When my father, Odysseus, and his men sailed off to the Trojan War, they were confident their gods favored a quick victory. Instead, the siege of Troy lasted ten years. After Troy fell, the survivors made their way home to Sparta, Mycenae, Pylos, and elsewhere in the ancient Peloponnese. Neither my father nor any of his troops arrived home with the rest. We waited for years as the news grew worse. Odysseus was dead, we were told,or imprisoned, or, worst yet, he had married another woman and abandoned my mother Penelope, my brother Telemachus, and me.


If he is alive somewhere, his thoughts may wander to Penelope and Telemachus, but he won’t be thinking of me. I am the daughter he doesn’t know exists. Odysseus went off to the Trojan War when his son, Telemachus, was barely old enough to walk. His wife, Penelope, was a teenage bride, and is now a young wife, mother, and queen who has to try to rule Ithaca without him.


I was born seven months after he left. I am a hero’s daughter and a princess of his realm, but I have lived my entire life without a father. I’m nineteen now, and still waiting.


All over the world, and throughout history children grow up as I have. This website will focus on the children of those men and women who have gone off to fight America's wars, and provide information and resources for all who care about military families and want to help.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Hidden Costs

NPR’s Alix Spiegel aired a story earlier this month about female veterans and the alarming rate of suicide among those returning from deployments. The journal Psychiatric Services recently published a study by Portland State University researcher Mark Kaplan, looking at female deaths by suicide in 16 states. He compared the rate of suicide among female veterans to that among female civilians, and found that female vets age 34 and younger are 3 times as likely to commit suicide than their civilian peers. About 20 percent of the suicides in the US each year are veterans, but because women make up a small percentage of veterans, their special situation is often overlooked.
Spiegel cites a story told by Dr. Jan Kemp, head of the Department of Veterans Affairs' National Suicide Prevention Hotline, about a female vet recently returned from deployment who collected up a large number of pills, drove her car to a remote area and called the hotline to relay a message to her husband. "She had had a recent argument with her husband and had come to the conclusion that he and her two young children would be better off without her," Kemp said. She had PTSD as well as a history of MST (military sexual trauma), which is apparently a significant part of the profile in many female veteran suicides. This story had a better ending than most, for the call was traceable by GPS, and she was found unconscious but still alive.
Women who call the hotline, Kemp says, talk much more about their children than men tend to. "They worry that because they sometimes get angry and don't deal with things well that they won't be appropriate with their kids," she said. "And I think that is one of the things that it most poignant on the hotline is when young mothers call and they're concerned about their ability to take care of their children because of their problems."
As more women find themselves on the front lines of the war on terror, it’s easy to predict this problem will grow. Though they will remain a small subset of a subset of overall suicides, we owe consideration of this problem to these women and the families they will leave behind if strong programs and strategies are not forthcoming.
Posted by About AART at 7:02 AM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)